This is not how a league is launched. For the first real public pronouncements about the Canadian league to come from contractor who puts bubbles over fields looks bad on basically our whole soccer establishment. What the investors in said Canadian league need to do now is to get ahead of this story — it’s about time for the rumours to end and some sort of public acknowledgement to be made. If a PR person isn’t in place, hire one. Now.

Mozzi Gyorio is set for a return to the NASL — a league he is in the process of suing.

“It was Ritchie Jones who reached out,” said Eckersley. “And I wanted something a bit different for my family. And my little brother has played in Canada, for Toronto, and he had nothing but good things to say about Canada.”

The Maccabiah Games don’t take place until 2017, but the search is on for coaches looking to steer Canada’s soccer teams in the tournament.

The United States is hosting the women’s CONCACAF qualifying tournament for the 2016 Olympics. And Group B — which includes Canada — will be played at Houston’s BBVA Compass Stadium, on a grass field that will be subjected to international rugby just days before the soccer tourney kicks off. Remember that in late January of 2013, the Canadian men’s national team played the United States in Houston. And, many of the Canadian players mentioned the poor quality of the pitch in Houston — which is really a multipurpose facility that is also the home of the MLS’s Houston Dynamo and the NWSL’s Houston Dash.

We’ve seen this over and over. A young players come up through our system, and then our small-but-oh-so-loud Canadian soccer community gives the kid way too much praise, way too much hype. It’s understandable, we’re so desparate for a saviour, an instant solution to decades worth of soccer rot, that we latch on to 17-year-old after 17-year-old. The message boards fill up with dreams of big moves to big clubs. And whether your name is Aleman, Alderson or Teibert, the overreaction to some early career successes puts you on a path to meet expectations that can’t possibly be met.

The FC Edmonton keeper already has a few things on his to-do list: He wants to be the team’s everyday starting goalkeeper; he wants to help the club push into the NASL playoffs, and he wants to impress Canadian national-team coach Benito Floro.

FC Edmonton coach Colin Miller feels this has been the most promising off-season in the club’s history.

Last November, after he’d wrapped up his NCAA season as the No. 1 shot stopped at Florida Gulf Coast University, the Canadian keeper got a call from FC Edmonton goalkeeping coach Darren Woloshen. Ingham learned that the NASL club had a lot of interest in signing the him — but the team had to know ASAP if the feeling was mutual. The Eddies wanted to get their roster sorted sooner rather than later.

At the end of the season, he said the players were told that they should go out and try to find new teams — but, if things changed, they could get a call back to come to Atlanta. So, Porter headed home to the Toronto area, where he worked out with a group of Canadian players who had dubbed themselves “Free Agent FC:” that group included former FC Edmonton players John Smits and Alex Semenets, retired MLS great Dwayne De Rosario and defender Nana Attakora.